The True Detective Recap, Episode 3: A Dream About Being a Person

"For a guy who sees no point in existence, you fret about it an awful lot," Martin Hart tells Rust Cohle in Episode 3, "The Locked Room." It's not just Rust who frets about existence; it's the whole show. True Detective hits all the marks of its genre, but the more episodes go by, the less I'm inclined to call it a crime drama. The true stakes are philosophical: Rust's bleak worldview against Marty's conventional one. It's the buddy cop formula, the straight man and the zany guy, taken to its darkest extreme. Forget who killed whom—we're now talking about whether being alive even matters in the first place.

And that's pretty much were we begin this episode. Rust and Marty are investigating the church that they believe Dora Lange started attending shortly before she died. Turns out to be a traveling revival-type affair, under a tent—"old-time religion," as Marty puts it. They stand outside, debating whether religion is a destructive fairy tale or necessary for human connectedness and morality. (Guess who's on which side?) Meanwhile, the pompadoured reverend (Shea Wiggam of Boardwalk Empire) preaches about the power of Jesus, to a crowd of people who feel powerless to change their own lives: "He saw you in those dark corners. He heard those thoughts. You are a stranger to yourself, and yet he knows you."

Multiple people in the congregation confirm that Dora Lange used to attend services at the burned-down chapel, prior to the fire (which was four months earlier). She'd been seen with "a tall man" who had shiny scars on his face. Doesn't seem like a great lead, but it's the best they've got. Marty and Rust discuss the state of the case at at a banh mi stand, which is apparently a thing they have in rural Louisiana. (Sure enough, here's some info about where to get Vietnamese food in New Orleans. Though that particular café, which is definitely outside the city, didn't come up in my searches.) Rust is still trying to convince Marty that the Lange case and the Fontaneau case (remember that one?) are connected, which results in this terrific bit of dialogue:

Marty: You know the real difference between you and me?

Rust: Yeah. Denial.

Marty: The difference is, that I know the difference between the idea and a fact. You are incapable of admitting doubt. Now that sounds like denial to me.

Rust: I doubt that.

Marty thinks that Rust might be suffering from "tunnel vision," twisting the facts of the case to match his ideas. In 2012, the cops ask Marty if Rust might have "led the case where he wanted it to go." No, says Marty. Rust was right all along.

Back at the Hart house (because home is where the—oh, never mind), Rust has returned Marty's lawnmower, and he and Maggie are getting to know each other. She wants to set him up with a friend; Rust has resigned himself to loneliness, she says, because he doesn't want to face the possibility of loss. Very perceptive, that Maggie. But this scene violates too many boundaries for Marty, who arrives home and immediately shows Rust the door, warning him never to mow his lawn again.

All of Marty's efforts to keep his work separate from his daughters have backfired; they're desperate to have a connection with their dad. They form their Barbie dolls into crime scenes, and now, the older girl has been reprimanded at school for drawing pictures of people having sex. How does she even know about this stuff, asks a bewildered Marty? "Girls always know before boys," says Maggie. Why is that? "Because they have to." (We've seen sexual abuse against young girls implied a couple times now: in Dora Lange's mother talking about the girl's father, and in the teenage prostitute who ran away from her uncle. Marty makes zero connections between the world he sees at work and the one at home.)

In the Harts' safe, warmly lit bedroom, Maggie calls Marty out on his bullshit, once and for all. They've been together since they were 19, but in the past year, things have taken a turn. He acts like a "sulky teenager." He's terrified of changing. And Marty agrees, confessing that he's terrified of turning forty. "I think I'm all fucked up," he sobs. "You are," says Maggie, and the sudden intimacy leads to sex.

Rust now interrogates a random tall guy with facial scars, because that's all they have to ride on at this point. Unsurprisingly, Rust is very good at interrogating people. His method, though, is interesting. "You only have one way out, and that's through the grace of God," Rust tells the suspect. "You're only how the Lord made you. You are not flawed...There's grace in this world and there's forgiveness for all, but you have to ask for it." So in trying to get this (innocent) guy to confess a crime, Rust uses lines that are practically interchangeable with the sermon we heard earlier in the episode.

Back to the detectives' personal lives. Rust and Maggie's friend Jennifer are on a blind date alongside Marty and Maggie, which is a terrible idea. Come on, Maggie, you're smarter than that. To her credit, everything between Rust and Jennifer goes fairly well. (Is this the woman he ends up almost marrying? Rust mentioned in a previous episode that he got serious with a woman introduced to him by Maggie.) But everything between Marty and Rust is a disaster.

Scratch that—it's just Marty who's the disaster. Raging drunk, he spots sexy stenographer Lisa on a date at the same bar, and gets stupidly angry. Later that night, he weaves his way to her apartment, busts down the door, and attacks the guy she took home. Nobody sleeps with his mistress. Nobody mows his lawn. This is the first truly violent moment we've seen from Marty, and though he manages to walk away, it's scary.

Rust doesn't take his date home. Instead, he stays up all night looking at photos of dead girls. Finally he has a breakthrough: A girl (Rihanna?) who supposedly drowned, but tested positive for methodone and LSD, has identical abdomen lacerations to Dora Lange, and has the same spiral drawn on the back of her corpse. The cops drive to the girl's hometown, Pelican Island, a tiny community two hours away. The landscape becomes bleaker and more ominous the closer they drive.

What they find when they arrive is Rihanna's grandfather, out in his crab boat. Here's what we learn about this new girl: She had a crappy home life (mother ran away), she attended a very small girls' school that shut down after Hurricane Andrew, and she was seeing a guy named Reggie Ledoux when she died.

Does that "girls' school" thing ring a bell? They don't say it explicitly, but in the last episode, Rust mentioned that Marie Fontaneau attended a small girls' school that shut down after Hurricane Andrew. That's probably why Rust is so eager to visit the school—a religious school, as it turns out. The school is connected with Reverend Billy Lee Tuttle, who is leading a task force investigating "anti-Christian crimes," and has been trying to get involved in the Dora Lange case.

But Rust has barely looked around when Marty calls him back to the car: their case has broken. Reginald Ledoux skipped parole eight months ago, was once busted in connection with a meth and LSD lab, and was a former cellmate of Dora Lange's husband Charlie. The detectives send out an all points bulletin and speed back to the station.

"And finally we arrive at Reginald Ledoux," Rust tells Papania and Gilbough. This is their man. We see shots of Ledoux's home in the woods—eerie, still, deserted. "It reminded me of my pop talking about Nam, the jungle," says Rust. And then he starts talking about those 14 straight hours he spent looking at pictures of dead girls. They all had the same expression in their eyes, he says: relief. It's the realization that "all your life, all your love, all your hate, all your memory, all your pain—it was all the same thing. It was all the same dream: a dream you had inside a locked room. A dream about being a person. And like a lot of dreams, there's a monster at the end of it."

And there, in the flashback to the woods, is the monster. Ledoux stomps out of his meth lab wearing a gas mask and underwear, carrying a machete, like a nightmare cross between Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet and Walter White.

But there's also something monstrous about present-day Rust, who has spent the whole episode cutting the lids off beer cans with a knife he apparently brought right into the police station. At the end, he fashions the shards into a sculpture of a person. Cohle makes funny little sculptures out of things that are lying around, just like Dora Lange's killer made the "devil traps." Cohle thinks that dead girls would rather be dead—and perhaps he needs to, because of his own daughter, but it doesn't make it less chilling. Cohle believes that humanity is just a series of locked rooms: the rooms in our own heads that contain our delusions of importance and meaning, the rooms in other people's heads that we'll never be able to access.

And judging from what has become of Rust, maybe some doors are meant to stay locked.